The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) said, "Any word of wisdom is the stray of the believer, who has the better right to it wherever it may be found".
WE live in an extremely cruel and violent world . Nothing demonstrates this fact for most people living in the Northern part of the country better than the grotesque events of the last days in July when a group called Boko Haram, headed by Muhammad Yusuf attacked police stations and government buildings in several Northern states. Pre-planned and deliberate vigilante terrorism carried out with the clear intent to kill, maim and destroy. The rest of us in the country heard, read and watched with a great degree of sorrow and bewilderment a tragedy unfolding in footages akin only to war zones. These were the days when death rained down in hundreds.
The leaders of Boko Haram were reported to have engaged in their sinful warfare against the nation in order to prohibit everything associated with Western civilisation; consider Western education a sin; and to unify Nigeria under Muslim law. This dangerous adventure by itself was a suicidal mission and they should have known it. What Western civilisation? It is true that the West has deteriorated to become materialistic, and religion has been reduced to a hobby amongst the vast majority of those Westerners who acknowledge God. Yet not all aspects of Western civilisation or Western way of life are necessarily unIslamic. If it were to be so, what would be the faith of hundreds of thousands of indigenous Muslims in the West or those emigrant Muslims living in the West, some of whom find it much freer to practise their faith than in their home countries? Yes, the West may not just be materialistic, in Europe and Northern American countries individual and moral ethics are being progressively wiped out to such a level that the countries have become ethnically dissipated and the-more-status-the-better societies.
In most of these countries, spiritual well-being has been dispensed with entirely in preference to economic well-being as the gap between the rich and poor grows and the lists of wants lengthen. But we must not forget that what we consider to be the East is sadly not doing badly in most of these areas as well. The Middle East, Africa as well as other parts of the world in their own ways are struggling hard to catch up with the West not in the best, but in the worst qualities of their societies.
The Muslim world has underlying falsely practised religion-moral bases to respond to this new world order but the solution is not to be found with these wacko extremist groups. Islam has extraordinary and incredible tradition but to call for the total rejection of the vast developments and knowledge that have taken place in the West, most of which are beneficial, is only detrimental to the conditions of the present-day Muslims and a great tragedy.
What Muslim law? Is it the Muslim law of over 1400 years old that served as a beacon of hope for humanity or the recently invented type of Muslim law being practised in some of the Sharia states where petty thieves have received the harshest punishments allowed in Islamic jurisprudence while the grand thieves in the governments implementing these laws act above the law with impunity to flaunt their ill-gotten wealth before dazzled and oppressed masses? And prohibiting everything associated with Western education is equally a crazy idea. Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) enjoined his followers to view any, yes any, word of wisdom wherever it exists, as the lost property of Muslims to which they have a right. The prophet also commanded Muslims to seek knowledge even unto China, a non-Islamic country at the time of the prophet.
What state of mind drives young men to a certain self-destruction in this manner beats anyone with a hint of sanity: a state of mind where the voices of intelligence, knowledge and reason have been stifled by the roar of fear, hate, anger and ignorance? But Muhammad Yusuf was only a symptom of a sick nation, a very sick nation. His case shows classically how people can be completely deluded and how such people can delude others in the conviction that they are actually doing a great service to the nation. In the Northern part of the country which retains the sole status of the incubator of all the violence and strifes that disfigure religions in Nigeria, the successive governments in the states have failed miserably to empower their people or provide clear leadership in the time of crises. These conditions seem to be conducive to perpetuate political exploitation of their people.
Also, the Federal Government's actions and public utterances before and during these events are also part of the symptoms of the collective sickness besieging us as a nation. Despite the number of religious problems we have had over the years in that part of the country, no individuals or groups have been brought to face the wrath of the law, thus a clear message to others to follow in their miserable examples. Nor have the groups that are fomenting the troubles been weakened substantially enough to stop them from becoming a real and present danger or threat to the peace of the country. Rather the police, which sees itself, and acts, above the law, had in a few sensationalist moves in the past arrested perfectly innocent individuals and paraded them as culprits in mythical terrorist plots. It is obvious that such arrests were sensationalists because almost all the victims of such arrests were freed without charge after a hellish treatment at the hands of the unscrupulous Nigeria police force. The deplorable, crazed and vile thugs of Boko Haram wrecked havoc on the nation, but so did the actions of the police bring the nation to shame. Actions that were implicitly sanctioned in the various statements of the federal government that provide political cover for Jackpot Justice - a type of anything goes justice, in its press briefings.
The police cannot be a law unto itself and every suspect has the protection of the law until the court, and only the court adjudicates in all cases. The irrational manner in which the police which is supposed to be trained to detect and repel such surprised attack - behaved while under the siege of Boko Haram group attack, and the rage with which some of the alleged crimes of cold blooded murder and extra-judicial killings were committed is to the everlasting shame of all Nigerians. The police seems not to realise that it is not the number of people that it is capable of killing that matters, but the number of Nigerians it makes (to feel) safe.
Mr. Yusuf and his lieutenants have finally met the same fatal end they prescribed and indiscriminately inflicted on others and they have now entered a world where it would become clear to them if the ideology they preached and died for was right or wrong. Only God knows the number of perfectly innocent citizens that have been sacrificed to arrive at this imminent knowledge. Tragically, their own findings will be too late for the hundreds like them that have died in this and similar causes over the years, and the nation they left behind which they helped made worse than they met it.
Let these grotesque events stand as a lesson for all of us in ignoble behaviour, an example to all people of faiths who harbour the worst human characters that this is a path to avoid and not to admire.
* Kamor is with the Muslim Public Affairs Centre, Nigeria.
